


counterfeit moon

by phollie



Category: Pandora Hearts
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-07
Updated: 2014-05-07
Packaged: 2018-01-23 21:22:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1579946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phollie/pseuds/phollie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Hormones,” Break mutters. “What awful things.”</p><p>“It’s not that!” Gilbert protests, breathless. “It’s never been just that, why does – why does everyone always blame every fucking thing on that – ”</p><p>“Gilbert,” Break says tiredly, “you are seventeen. You are at one of the heights of a lifetime of feeling far too much.”</p><p>Gilbert lets out a laugh that, were anyone else there to hear it, would make them think yes, perhaps the boy is mad. But Break knows better. “Well, that’s dazzling, Break, because I’ve spent my entire life feeling too much and it doesn’t look like it’s going to let up any time soon.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	counterfeit moon

**counterfeit moon**

+

_and i hope when you think of me years down the line_   
_you can’t find one good thing to say_   
_and i’d hope that if i found the strength to walk out_   
_you’d stay the hell out of my way_

-           _[no children](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRP6egIEABk), _ the mountain goats

+

            “Maybe I am, though?”

            Break admits a wheeze of a laugh and lets his head fall back onto the plush cushion of the couch, staring at the boy with a wolfish interest so very close to fondness. Gilbert is always so dreadfully endearing when he’s in the throes of an interpersonal crisis, especially at two in the morning, still in his day-clothes but only more rumpled, cravat untied and one shirt sleeve hanging down whilst the other remains rucked up above his elbow. His face is wan and sleepless, birdlike in the skittishness of his mouth and the quick little ticks of his head as he looks about the room and then back at Break. In the candlelight, the boy’s face is moon-like and sweetly pathetic. “Don’t laugh,” he mutters. “I’m being serious.”

            “You? Being serious? Impossible.” Break offers the boy a slick grin when he sees those golden eyes lid in annoyance. “Gilbert, if you were  _any_  more serious, you would turn to stone. Sometimes I fear for your poor little body and the day you stress it to death during some passionate attempt at trying to understand everything in the universe all at once. You’re just like Liam in that respect, only more neurotic and less bespectacled.”

            Gilbert’s pretty throat bobs in a swallow. “Mr. Liam is a…a very respectable man.”

            Break’s grin only deepens. “Yes, you do seem to enjoy the sport of watching him from afar with stars in your eyes.”

            The eyes in question lift in a sharp glare, that delicious anger seeping from Gilbert’s gaze like a toxin, and  _god_  how Break could teach him to hone that hatred, how easily he could shape it into the most lethal of blades for the boy to use at his disposal. But Gilbert, the poor thing, he loves too much,  _feels_  too much. Break almost feels sorry for him, but he yawns instead, arms stretching high before relaxing back down onto the back of the couch. “Anyway,” he sighs out, “back to your previous question. No, Gilbert, you are not losing your mind. Unfortunately. Though it would surely make the business you’re getting yourself into that much easier to deal with if you were already too far gone to care.”

            Gilbert keeps wringing his hands, wringing his hands. “And how do you know I’m not mad…?”

            “Because you wouldn’t even be asking me such a thing if you were,” Break says lightly. “And besides, I  _know_  you. Oh, I see you cringing at that. You don’t need to. I am, after all, your link to what you most desire, am I not? Your position in Pandora is entirely thanks to  _me,_  yes?”

            “I can’t take it in that house anymore, Break,” Gilbert says with a miserable sort of passion in his voice, that heavy rain he seems to carry inside of him at all times gathering in dark clouds in his eyes. “It’s bad enough being under the Nightray roof but then there’s Vincent to deal with and…and I’ve never felt so far away from obtaining Raven than I do now. One more rejection and I won’t be able to take it. Not again.”

            “Oh, yes you will,” Break says, laughing. “You’ll take it, Gilbert. You’ll take it as many times as it requires. Otherwise you’ll go nowhere.”

            Gilbert’s jaw tightens as he grits his teeth. He just keeps wringing, wringing, wringing his hands. “I can’t save Oz without Raven,” he whispers, a picture of despair painted in black and white save for the two golden slits of his eyes that cut out onto the dark room like tiny twin lanterns.

            Break uncrosses his legs, crosses them the opposite way, and fixes Gilbert with a searching stare that visibly makes the boy nervous. “A hypothetical question,” he ventures silkily. “What  _would_  you do if you couldn’t obtain Raven? What would be your next immediate action?”

            “Kill myself,” Gilbert says without so much as a blink of hesitation. The words are flat and murky, like a stagnant lake too filthy to swim in.

            But Break isn’t disquieted. He’d expected those words, expected the miserable confidence that they carry, the certainty that yes, oh yes,  _that_  would be the end, the last straw, the final thing that would push Gilbert to the edge of infinity and then to topple down into blackness, and then – nothingness.  But instead, he asks, “That’s a bit extreme, don’t you think?”

            “No,” Gilbert says. “It isn’t extreme. You asked me what I would do and I told you.”

            “Ending your life, Gilbert.”

            Gilbert blinks. There’s nothing in his eyes now, and Break can at least admit a bit of uneasiness in regards to  _that_. Gilbert’s eyes are always too heavy, too angry, too much of everything all at once, and there’s a sort of charm about that because Break knows he’s so young and impressionable and fresh, new blood barely touched by the claws of life and yet still knowing darkness so intimately despite that. But once all the fire pours out and all that’s left are two hollow lanterns with the lights barely glittering, then, perhaps, Break can see the potential for this boy to be frightening without even trying.

            They both stare at each other for a long time. Gilbert looks like a poltergeist in the doorway, his silhouette a strange, swaying blackness as it spills across the floor. 

            “Well,” Break chirps, slicing through the tense silence settled round the room, “I suppose if you’ve made up your mind for certain, then we really can’t afford any room for failure, now can we?”

            Gilbert blinks again. The flutter of his eyelashes seems to bring back some of the light to his gaze. His shadow shakes a little, comes back to life rather than lingering in that unsettling limbo. “I…I didn’t think you would care.”

            “Care?” The word tastes ugly on Break’s tongue; the word he tries to avoid the most. “Well, I suppose on  _some_  level I would care if something happened to you. We  _are_ of great use to each other. It would be annoyingly difficult to find someone else who could take your role.”

            “My role?”

            “We  _are_  partners, after all. In a purely professional sense, of course.”

            “And that’s all?”

            It’s a strange question, and even Gilbert himself seems to be surprised that it came out of him. He quickly looks down at the floor, a warm flush spreading beneath the olive tone to his skin and turning it red. It makes him look so young, so painfully young. Break’s body doesn’t remember youth. Only slow decay and ticking clocks laughing at him.

            “Sorry,” Gilbert says for a reason that likely only makes sense to him. “I’m leaving now.”

            “No, no, no,” Break chimes. “No, no. Stay and explain.”

            “I won’t.”

            “Then stand there silently as I drag the answer out of you through my own methods.” A flash of a smile, candied and sharp. “Like plucking the feathers from a bird, one by one. It’s your choice, Gilbert.”

            That seems to snap Gilbert to attention, and he lets out a horrible sigh to express how clearly he understands the power of Break’s interrogations and how little he wants to be a part of it. He stops wringing his hands and swipes one through his overgrown hair, the dark curls angrily pushed out of his eyes so that Break can see the golden flare of them in full. Splendid; he’s shaping out so nicely. “Well,” Gilbert huffs out, “there’s no _point_  in even  _elaborating_  since all you’ll do is  _laugh_.”

            “Laughter is good for the soul, even the wickedest of ones.”

            “Shut up.”

             “I will if you explain what you meant by that cryptic comment,” Break says, delicately settling his bangs over his empty eye socket with the very tips of his fingers. “It’s not like you to be cryptic. You’re normally so brash, so arrogant in your sadness. Now that you’ve shown me something different, you’ve intrigued me.”

            Gilbert’s mouth turns down in a horrid frown. A hideous shadow passes over his face and for a moment he’s almost eerie, almost striking. Once he’s older and the lines of him have broadened, his boyhood long gone and replaced with something harder, firmer, Breaks knows that’ll be it, the dead-ringer that steals the hearts of men and women alike – the ability to unnerve and enthrall a crowd with a single cold look. But right now at seventeen, he just looks sad and foolish, weak, a dark willow standing just beyond the threshold of the parlor door and swaying on his feet like something sick.

            Growing impatient, Break’s eye flashes in the darkness, fixed on the boy like a poisoned dart. “ _Say_ it, Gilbert. I thought you would have learned by how miserable of an effort it is to hide anything from me. Need I remind you?”

            “I’m mad because of  _you_ , you fucking – ” Gilbert’s entire body seizes up, shoulders stiffening, jaw clenching, hands balling into fists. His face is flushed with high color as a sudden mania sweeps over him, an internal scream that Break can almost hear if he listens closely enough; and even without needing to hear that scream, Gilbert’s heavy, labored breathing is enough for Break in order to pinpoint the exact moment in which the boy’s psyche bends beneath the weight of all the things he isn’t saying. “It’s because of _you_  that I’m even asking this,” he pants out. “Because only a  _mad_  person would have these sort of thoughts in their head about someone like  _you_.”

            For a while, Break merely stares at him. Then the lid falls over his red eye and he sighs. “Hormones,” he mutters. “What awful things.”

            “It’s not that!” Gilbert protests, breathless. “It’s never been just that, why does – why does  _everyone_  always blame every fucking thing on that – ”

            “Gilbert,” Break says tiredly, “you are seventeen. You are at one of the heights of a lifetime of feeling far too much.”

            Gilbert lets out a laugh that, were anyone else there to hear it, would make them think yes, perhaps the boy  _is_  mad. But Break knows better. “Well, that’s dazzling, Break, because I’ve spent my entire  _life_  feeling too much and it doesn’t look like it’s going to let up any time soon.”

            “At least you admit it,” Break sighs out, surveying his fingernails.

            “Why do you always treat me like a child?”

            “Because you are one.”

            Gilbert opens his mouth to speak. Break holds up a hand to stop him. “No. Don’t give me that ‘I’ve legally been an adult since I was fifteen’ speech. It isn’t a matter of age. You could be ten thousand years old and my viewpoint wouldn’t shift in the slightest. Contrary to your  _belief,_  Gilbert, there aren’t any coming-of-age ceremonies for when a child becomes an adult in the real, visible world.” Break allows himself a sour smirk. Gilbert winces. “I’ve always found those ceremonies to be quite dull anyway…prissy higher-ups in fancy clothes introducing some wide-eyed, fifteen-year-old toddler into a world they’re scarcely prepared to even be a part of. What a joke.”

            Gilbert’s eyes are huge, owlish. The color to his face has drained out to a furious white. “You wanted me to tell you what I was trying to say,” he says, his voice far away and empty.

            “Yes,” Break says genially, “and you did.”

            “And you’re mocking me.”

            “I thought you were used to that by now.”

            “What the hell would make you think I’d ever be used to being taken for a fool?”

            Break shrugs. “Your emotional masochism, perhaps. That’ll do it. Take this situation, for example.” His voice takes a dip for the quiet, the murmurous. “What did you expect out of me, Gilbert? That you’d spill your heart out to my waiting ears and I’d offer you my lap for the night?”

            Gilbert’s face flushes hot again, his gaze quickly dropping to the left and to the floor. A sharp breath puffs out from his nose, his mouth pursed tight so as to not let any more confessions slip.

            “You knew it would be like this,” Break goes on, recrossing his legs in a slow, fluid movement. “That’s why you came to me tonight. You couldn’t have possibly thought I’d empathize with your predicament, could you? That I’d magically transform into Oz Vessalius and give you what you need?”

            Break can see a thin mist of tears gloss over Gilbert’s eyes now. Even worse is that they aren’t furious tears; they’re genuinely sorrowful, the boy’s humiliation too heavy to contain within himself. Break only watches him, now motionless on the couch as Gilbert just keeps swaying on his feet and clutching at his shirt with weak, shaking fists.

            “Suppose I shouldn’t be pinning you beneath me during our sparring sessions anymore,” Break says, mock-thoughtful. “Wouldn’t want to contribute to your ‘madness’ any more than need be.”

            “You’re horrible,” Gilbert whispers on a thin, tremulous line, staring at the floor. “You’re…absolutely horrible.”

            Break smiles, serene. “No arguments there.”

            There are definitely tears now. Break sees them dripping onto the floor at Gilbert’s feet. They make the tiniest, most delicate of sounds. Like little watery heartbeats.

            And then, all at once, it’s over. Gilbert is drifting out of the room without a word, his face hidden, until the darkness of the hall swallows him whole and Break is alone again. Break stares off into the shadows that Gilbert once occupied, breathing very slowly. He feels enormously tired. His head sinks back onto the cushion of the couch as his body deflates in one massive sigh, his eye to the ceiling.

            “Poor thing,” he whispers.  


End file.
